Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink?
Matt. 25:37 Who Is Watching, and Why?
In 1980, I was asked by TV Guide to write an article on the Electronic Church. The piece was published in mid-July with the cover headline
"Why TV Evangelists Can`t Be Pastors." In the article I listed some of the innovations of the electronic evangelists, and then raised five questions:
- Does the electronic church separate people from their own community?
- Is the electronic church good evangelism?
- Has the electronic church become captive to commercial broadcasting?
- Are the values implicit in most successful electronic-church programs actually the values of the secular society it pretends to reject?
- Is the electronic church driving religious diversity off the air?
In a summary paragraph I said that the electronic church helps some people but misleads far more, and that in the long run it probably is doing more harm than good.
I had expected to get letters in rebuttal, since TV Guide reaches some 47 million readers. But I was not prepared for the deluge of letters that came in, almost 500 in all. Most, though by no means all of them, were supportive of the electronic evangelists. I replied to every letter that could be answered.
The letters were so intriguing and informative that I kept a tally of their basic points. Two-thirds of the writers were women, ranging in age from 15 to 90, and several correspondents made a point of saying that they were "not a frumpy old lady" or "not middle rural America." There was one "Truck Driver for Jesus" and one Jesuit Ph.D., but most merely described themselves in one way or another as born-again Christians.
Four basic themes emerged from the critical group. One, quite
predictably, was a strong defense of various electronic church programs.
For example, "I, for one, have found a personal relationship with Jesus Christ by watching the 700 Club and PTL Club." And, "Personally, Oral Roberts has made my day many times when I was depressed, and he does write me back."
A second response, almost as predictable, was a litany of the ills of our nation, focusing primarily on homosexuality, abortion, anti-Christian TV programs, and communism.
A third theme, often linked with the second, was the view that the solution to the problems facing America is to establish a theocracy. A fairly typical letter proclaimed, "I believe that the USA was founded as
a Nation Under God and has had God`s grace all these years and only when the laws and Supreme Court decisions started to give more power to the secular groups has God`s Grace begun to diminish and soon we will no longer be a blessed nation."
But the theme I was not prepared for, either as to its intensity or its pervasiveness, was an angry outpouring against local churches and their preachers. Letter after letter accused the local church of being dry, unfriendly, cold, not filled with the Spirit, unbiblical, works of Satan, dead, or dying. "So many of the Starched Collar Ministers [these writers loved capital letters] don`t bother to help others after they preach their sermon and shake hands. It`s a cold howdy-do and goodbye." Or: "when I needed Christ I got social and community planning and programs and softball but no Jesus. People want truth and salvation." And: "PTL is better than any church I have ever attended, which is quite a few."
Finally: "The (so-called) elec-tronic church has done a more valuable service to this country as well as many others than any boring, unholy- ghost-filled church around."
A few writers defended their local church, indicating that they attended regularly while also listening -- usually daily -- to the electronic
preachers. But by and large the responses indicated that the local church simply is not meeting the needs of many, many people.
Unfortunately, the dry, unfriendly, and moribund condition of many mainline churches is not just a religious problem, for the vacuum that is created has spawned a crisis in the society as a whole. Franklin Littell points out that totalitarian creeds and systems have always arisen and come to power at times and places where religion was tired, ineffective, corrupted by privilege, and lacking in appeal to youth. From what I could determine from the letters, a goodly number of those who took up their pens to defend the electronic church against my criticisms are ready and waiting for some kind of totalitarian solution.
Many were lonely. Many were sick and tired of what life has dealt them. They wanted a part of the American dream: "The Bible says we are called to be the head not the tail and should have the best. . . . Please answer this as soon as possible and write back to me."
Some sought solutions in prejudice: "It`s the Jews like Mike Wallace that keep on persecuting Christians and they are in a position to be heard." Some already were in thrall to authority: "I go to my own
church three times a week. But whenever possible I do listen to Bro.
Falwell. I am sure he doesn`t want me to do otherwise."
A few were consumed by hatred: "P.S. Keep your hands off the work of God. You have no right!" And from an anonymous cassette tape
recording: "Doctor William F. Fore -- it will give me great pleasure to slit your throat!"
Reading and answering these letters brought me to the disturbing
conclusion that while the electronic-church programs may be providing inadequate and even misleading and harmful solutions to the needs of many of their listeners and viewers, at least they are bringing to the American scene an accurate awareness of what those needs are. And if my correspondents are reasonably representative of the electronic- church audience, most of the mainline churches are not even aware of the nature or the depth of the needs of these millions of men and women who live within reach of their own buildings and services and
congregations.
What are their needs? They are simple: to be recognized, to be needed, to be of worth, to live in a world that can be understood, to be secure.
And the issues that bother them are the very ones that bother members of the mainline churches: war and peace, the misuse of sex, the unjust use of political and economic power, how to find useful work and satisfying play, how to maintain a society open to many points of view, how to have relationships with other persons that are meaningful and rewarding.
These letters drove home to me the sobering fact that the Electronic Church is a formidable threat to mainline churches today, not because it threatens to reduce income or attendance, but because it has revealed a significant failure on the part of most mainline churches to deal with many of the people in their own neighborhoods. To their everlasting shame, the mainline churches have simply failed to understand and meet the needs of many people in their communities, people who are
searching for a satisfying religious experience, but who have not found it in the mainline churches. These people, many of them alienated, unfulfilled, forgotten, or ignored, but also many dynamic, independent, and searching, are going to find what solace and direction they can from the superficial and ultimately harmful ministrations of the electronic church if they cannot find it in the mainline churches. For all of its problems, the electronic church at least has not ignored them.
Research Results
Throughout the 1970s debate over the effectiveness of the new television ministries raged between the mainline churches and the electronic-church groups. Was the electronic church luring members away from the local church, or was it encouraging members to attend more regularly? Was it taking money from local churches or was it furthering overall giving? Was it an effective new evangelistic tool or was it merely reaching the already committed?
Mainline church leaders as well as many evangelical leaders tended to be critical of the electronic church. Its supporters were euphoric about its, and their, new-found power and prestige. However, neither side was able to buttress arguments with solid facts, because very little research had been focused directly on the new phenomenon. The charges and countercharges became all the more strident because of the lack of real information.
In July l980 the National Council of Churches` Communication
Commission and the National Religious Broadcasters jointly issued an invitation to key groups on both sides of the controversy to join in a major research project to get at the facts. As a result the Ad Hoc
Committee on Religious Television Research was formed, surely one of the century`s most broadly based religious coalitions. Eventually the
$175,000 project was funded by some 39 groups -- ranging from "The Old Time Gospel Hour" (Jerry Falwell) and the Christian Broadcasting Network (Pat Robertson) to the U.S. Catholic Conference, the Episcopal Church and the United Church of Christ, and with representation from virtually every part of the religious spectrum in between.
The controlling idea was that even though each side disagreed with the other as to tactic and strategy, both wanted solid information. The groups could strive to agree on what questions they both wanted answered, and once the questions were clear, they could cooperate to hire the best professional researchers to find the answers. A significant advantage of this approach was that neither side could later attempt to discredit the results of the research on the basis that "they asked the wrong questions."
The Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania was hired as the primary contractor, with the Gallup
Organization of Princeton, New Jersey, conducting the national survey.
After two years of planning, field work, and analysis, the results were announced at a press conference held at the Graduate Center of New York City University on April 16, l984.1.
The study, consisting of two volumes and buttressed by dozens of charts, made the following major points:
1. The viewing audience for the electronic-church programs is far smaller than had been claimed. In l982 a Gallup survey found that 43%
of the total population said that they had watched religious
programming in the past 30 days, and another Gallup poll in l98l
showed that 32% said that they had watched during the past week. This would work out to some 71 million viewers per week.
But what people claim and what they do are very different. Researchers have long known that people have a tendency to say what they think would please those asking the questions. For example, years ago public broadcasters discovered, to their sorrow, that the people who said they wanted more symphonies and ballet on TV really preferred to watch movies. To get around this problem with religious TV viewers, the Annenberg researchers went to several previous months of Arbitron television viewers` diaries, looked up the actual programs watched by day, hour and channel in the TV Guide, and thereby identified
"confirmed viewing" -- in other words, what people really watched.
This information told a far different story. According to the diaries, there is a total duplicated national religious television audience of 24.7 million weekly for religious television programs. But this number includes many of the same people counted two, three, or even a dozen times -- if they watched that many programs during a week. Taking into account that the diaries may underreport by as much as 15%, the study estimated that an unduplicated audience of 13.3 million people watched at least 15 minutes of religious TV per week. This amounts to 6.2% of the national TV audience.
Unfortunately, this key finding was based on a questionable assumption.
What Arbitron really provided was only the number of households viewing, and the households were then multiplied by the number of people assumed to be watching, to give the total audience . Annenberg researchers assumed 2.4 persons, which is the national average number of persons per household. But almost all religious programming is
scheduled during fringe or even deep-fringe time, when the figure of 1.4 persons per household is usually used by the broadcasting industry. If this 1.4 figure is used, the number of people watching 15 minutes or more per week is 7.2 million.
But this is the number of people who watch only 15 minutes per week or more, and 15 minutes per week is not very much when the average viewer spends more than 30 hours per week watching TV. If we take the number of people who tune in one hour or more per week -- a more realistic definition of the "regular" viewer, the figures are considerably smaller, and using the 1.4 person-per-household estimate, the
Annenberg data show there are about 3.76 million persons, or
approximately 1.69% of the total population, who watch one hour or more of religious television each week.
Two years after the Annenberg-Gallup study was released, Pat Robertson`s CBN commissioned the A. C. Nielsen Company to measure the electronic church viewing audience again, including, for the first time, the cable-TV viewers, since CBN is carried on thousands of cable systems. CBN itself released the information from the
proprietary study, amid considerable fanfare, reporting that the top ten religious programs attracted 40.2% or 61 million American households during February 1984.2.
However, analysis by Stewart M. Hoover the original Annenberg
research team revealed that this information was misleading.3. The data measured anyone who had watched at least 6 minutes of any one of the programs during the whole month of February. Also, it measured the percent of viewers who were viewing at the time the top-ten programs were on the air -- periods such as early Sunday mornings when the total number of viewers is very small. The 40.2% turned out to be a
percentage of only 33 million viewers, in contrast to the more than 100 million persons who view during prime-time each evening. Hoover also pointed out that any program has a certain probability of being selected at random, and that a program on the air when there are few viewers has a greater chance of being selected completely at random. He concluded that it is unlikely that the overall, unduplicated weekly audience for these programs is any larger than the 13.3 million originally estimated by the Annenberg study. He also showed from the Nielsen statistics that those who subscribe to cable TV are actually less likely to view
religious programs than those without cable.4.
2. The electronic church is not effective evangelism, although it is an effective reinforcer of the existing religious beliefs of viewers. The Annenberg study reported: "The audience for religious programs on television is not an essentially new, or young, or varied audience.
Viewers of religious programs are by and large also the believers, the church-goers, the contributors. Their viewing . . . appears to be an expression, a confirmation of a set of religious beliefs and not a substitute for them."5.
The research gave us a helpful profile of the average viewers. They are are somewhat older, lower in education and income, more conservative, more "fundamentalist" and more likely to live in rural areas of the South and Midwest than are nonviewers. Heavy viewers (those who watch one hour or more per week) are largely Southern Baptist (19%) and other Baptists (21%), followed by charismatic Christians (10.5 %), Catholics (10%), United Methodists (8.3%) and other Methodists (7.1%). The rest of the mainline churches, such as Presbyterian, Lutheran, Disciples, United Church of Christ, and Episcopalian, each make up less than 2%
of the viewing audience.
Fully 77% of the heavy viewers of religious TV are church members, and almost all of them attend church at least once a month. Regardless of their denominational affiliation, they are much more likely than nonviewers to read the Bible, to pray frequently, to take the Bible literally, to believe "that Jesus Christ will return to earth someday," to report having been "born again," to believe in miracles, and to favor
"speaking in tongues." They thus scored high on what the researchers called their "literalist/charismatic" scale.
When heavy viewers were asked whether watching religious television had changed their involvement in the local church, 7% said it had, and 3% said it had decreased their involvement. One in six said that
religious TV contributed more than their church to their spiritual life, and one in three said that it contributed more than their church to their information about moral and social issues.
14% said that their viewing of religious programs was "a substitute for going to church", and about 20% said that they watched religious programs on Sundays during church hours. Of course, this figure
includes many of the ill, the elderly, and those who could not readily go out to church, regardless of whether the electronic-church programs were on the air.
The Gallup summary pointed out that while religious TV viewing does not seem to be associated with lower levels of church attendance,
volunteer work, or church contributions among the heavy viewers taken as a whole, it does seem to be associated with lower religious
involvement among persons over 50, divorced persons, those who require assistance in going places, persons with low levels of education, and those who have become dissatisfied with their local church. In other words, while the electronic church probably is not causing much of a decrease in mainline church attendance, it does provide an attractive alternative for a relatively small group who find watching television an acceptable substitute for attending church.
Financial giving to the cause of their choice is another way people reinforce their religious beliefs. The most highly visible electronic- church ministries were the most likely to request money, and their requests were numerous -- 40% of all programs included at least three requests for money during the course of each telecast. The average requested ranged from a minimum of $31 and up to $600 per program.
No mainline program in the survey asked for a specific amount of money.
Most people who gave to the electronic church also to gave to their local church, and vice versa. However, only 6% of all viewers were regular contributors to religious programs. An additional 13%
contributed "once in a while," and 5% more gave to "special appeals only." But those who did give gave a great deal. Of the 6% regular contributors, 40% gave to three or more programs. Their contributions averaged $35.17 per contribution, and the mean total contribution was
$95.24 per year.
Another part of the reinforcing process is individual contact. A third of viewers said that they had been contacted by mail during the past year.
Twenty percent said they had received five or more letters, and ll%
reported that they had written to or called the programs they watched.
On the other hand, only 3% said that they had received a telephone call from any of the programs.
One of the more revealing questions had to do with "outreach" by the viewers themselves. Viewers were asked with whom they often
discussed the programs they watched. The replies were: family (23%), friends (13%), and others at church (6%). Only 5% mentioned that they